Sunday, July 20, 2014

Mexico doing what we want: Protecting its southern border - On Southern Border, Mexico Faces Crisis of Its Own

TENOSIQUE, Mexico — For years, Mexico’s most closely watched border was its northern one, which generations of Mexican migrants have crossed seeking employment and refuge in the United States.

But the sudden surge of child migrants from Central America, many of them traveling alone, has cast scrutiny south, to the 600-mile border separating Mexico and Guatemala.

Now Mexico finds itself whipsawing between compassion and crackdown as it struggles with a migration crisis of its own. While the public is largely sympathetic to migrants and deeply critical of the United States’ hard-line immigration policies, officials are under pressure from their neighbors to the north and south as they try to cope with the influx. As a result, they are taking measures that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

Mexico has quietly stepped up the pace of deportation of migrants, some of them unaccompanied children. It announced plans to stop people from boarding freight trains north and will open five new border control stations along routes favored by migrants.

“Never before has Mexico announced a state policy on the border, and now it has,” the interior secretary, Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, said in an interview. “It is absolute control of the southern border.”

But now Mexico plans to bolster its border security, including a plan to stop waves of people, some of them with babies and toddlers, from stowing away on a northbound freight train known as “The Beast,” because of rampant accidents and violent crime. Images of the train and the little done to stop it had appalled American members of Congress and human rights advocates.